Today's extra-large Trailer Happy Hour will catch you up on all the Comic-Con TV trailers that you've missed
Welcome back to Trailer Happy Hour, where not all trailers are created equal. But even if not every promo or teaser—especially for TV—has the clout to make it at Comic-Con’s big Hall H, we still love them all, and pledge to gather them together in one safe place for you to conveniently devour. (That metaphor got away from us a bit, but the point still stands.) So here we go: Trailer Happy Hour, Comic-Con TV edition, full of outlaw bikers, rebellious mutants, and all the vampires and zombies you could want. Let’s dive right in.
First up: The trailer for long-in-development Sons Of Anarchy spin-off Mayans M.C. Debuting September 4 on FX, the series will probably look pretty familiar to fans of Kurt Sutter’s last show about gritty, criminal bikers with conflicted loyalties, albeit with the addition of a shotgun-toting Edward James Olmos to liven things up a bit.
Next up, a trailer/music video/sword sales promo reel for the third season of Syfy’s Van Helsing. Starting with extended screaming and only getting more intense from there, it doesn’t tell us much about what’ll be happening during the series’ next year, but it certainly sets a tone. (That tone being “blooooooooooooooood.”)
Keeping the sanguine train rolling, we’ve also got trailers for the upcoming seasons of both Fear The Walking Dead and its original parent series. Fear (back first, on August 12) goes the old “cheerful music over spooky footage” route, before suggesting that a storm is coming that’s going to push the West Coast batch of survivors to their limits. The flagship series, meanwhile, puts a lot of focus on Rick (understandable, considering Andrew Lincoln has officially confirmed he’s leaving the show this year), while still making it clear that there’s no undead horde more dangerous than a bunch of people who just can’t get along. (Also, Fantastic Beasts’ Dan Fogler is there. Hi, Dan!)
Things aren’t looking any less tense for the mutant cast of Fox’s Gifted, either, per the Con trailer for the show’s second season. Most of the focus is on Polaris—who went full Magneto as the show’s first season came to a close, ripping apart airplanes and openly attacking humanity—and her upcoming pregnancy (complete with lots of electromagnetic chaos every time the baby kicks). But really, it’s not seeming great for anybody, mutant or otherwise, in the show’s post-X-Men world, especially with new supervillain Reva Paige pulling the strings of the Hellfire Club. Gifted’s back on Fox in the fall.
Speaking of X-Men, who’s up for a show that’s basically that, except with a bunch of mythical creatures? That’s the very obvious premise of the new Vampire Diaries sequel series, Legacies, starring VD alum Matthew Smith as the ersatz Professor X for a group of troubled vampires, werewolves, and witches (or in the case of the show’s protagonist Hope, all three; her description of herself as a “tribrid,” carried over from her time on The Originals, might be the toughest pill the series’ teaser trailer asks us to swallow). Get past that hard chunk of silliness, though, and there’s probably plenty of the far more palatable pulp goofiness that’s become this franchise’s stock in trade to sample. (Still: Tribrid. Jesus Christ.)
We’ve also got a fresh trailer for The Simpsons’ annual excuse to kill off all of its characters for a night, “Treehouse Of Horror XXIX.” It’s utterly baffling that the show hasn’t done an Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers riff yet, but hey, if it lets us watch Comic Book Guy get messily devoured by life-sucking spores, we’ll take it.
On a more cheerful note, you can also check out the trailer for Netflix’s latest animated series, The Dragon Prince. The big takeaway here is the show’s pedigree: It’s being produced by Aaron Ehasz, best known for his role as head writer on the original Avatar: The Last Airbender. (He also worked on Futurama; he’s credited with “Luck Of The Fryrish, among others.) It’s not clear yet how much of Ehasz’s charm will rub off on the series, though; outside one moment of lightness, it all feels pretty grim, and the computer animation is of a style that’s going to take some definite getting used to.
Also in animation: The trailer for Cartoon Network’s beautifully strange Infinity Train. The show’s pilot has been online for a while now, but this new tease shows off a different art style for the series, about a young girl trapped on a bizarre, extra-dimensional train. It all feels fascinatingly spooky; we can’t wait until 2019 to give it a fuller look.
Finally, let’s end this little round-up on a more cosmic note, with a trailer for the upcoming season of Cosmos: Possible Worlds. Featuring a lot of very flashy CGI, and host Neil DeGrasse Tyson asking big, important questions that aren’t, “Why wasn’t this space movie more realistic?” for once, it all looks interestingly trippy, in a “You’re going to be hearing a lot about this during small talk at dinner parties” sort of sense. The series will air next year, on both Fox and National Geographic.